Ethnology and the Golden Age

Author(s): George Norlin

Source: Classical Philology, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1917), pp. 351-364
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 ETHNOLOGY AND THE GOLDEN AGE
Br GEORGE
NORLI

It is the common habit of civilized peoples to assume that the

fabric of their customs and institutions represents a departure from
a primitive condition or state of nature, and to estimate the value
and direction of their mode of life by the contrasts which it presents
to the days of long ago. But the picture which is drawn of this state
of nature is itself colored in no small degree by the prejudices of the
moment either for or against present conditions and tendencies.
Those who are intoxicated by the wine of their achievements are prone
to think of the natural state as the negation of al the good things
which man has won for himself in the course of an ever-forward march,
whnle those who have grown oversensitive to the evils of civilization
dream of a lost paradise or a golden age.
But in seeking to understand these antithetical points of view. we
have to reckon with something more than subjective mood or fancy.
Culture theorists of the more sober sort have usually sought some
basis of historical reality, some solid ground of fact; assuming that
in distant parts of the world, far removed from the currents of civiliza-
tion, people remain very much now as they were in the beginning,1
they have commonly taken as their point of departure, in tracing the
course of human development, facts or reported facts about far-away
primitive tribes. Professor J. L. Myers in a recent pamphlet2 has
presented a careful study of the influence of ethnology on modern
political science, proving, especially for the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries, that there is a very close relation between the shifting
ideas of that period as to the origin and growth of society and the
ever-rncreasing store of information about uncivilized peoples which
was opened up by exploration of remote regions of the earth, especially
1As Vrilhjmur Stef&nson assumes that he found among the Dolphin and Utnion
Straits 5Ekimos the conditions of the Stone Age. " My Quest in the Arctic," Harper's
Afagazinc, CXXVI, 512.
The Influence of Anthropolo4y on the Courae of Political Science, University of
California Press, February, 1916.
(CLASSICAL PIrILOLOGY XII, October,1817] 351

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 352 GEORGE NORLIN

the Americas. The first accounts of primitive life, derived from

discoverers who brought to these aborigines "not peace but a sword,"'
led to the view of man in his natural state which we see in Shake-
speare's Caliban and Hobbes's wretched creature "poor, nasty, and
brutish, in continual feare and danger of violent deathh"-a concep-
tion which held the boards until the Jesuit Fathers, approaching
the Indians as human being,slike themselves, and not seldom meet-
ing with response of docile affection and loyalty, began in their letters
home to contrast the simple virtues of these children of nature with
the vices of European civilization, and so prepared the way for the
ideal savage of Pope and Rousseau.2
We have here, if I am not mistaken, an instructive parallel to the
influences which deterrminedthe course of Culturgeschichtein ancient-
Greece. When the Hellenes established the outposts of their civiliza-
tion among the hostile tribes which bordered the Mediterranean, and
especially on the coasts of what they at first called the Unfriendly
Sea, they must have seen in the savage life which opposed and
threatened them mainly the dark obverse of their own brighter
culture.3 Their tales of cave-dwelling, man-eating- monsters reflect
something of this early experience ;4 and as late as Herodotus we find
the tendency to dwell, by way of contrast, on the savag-e customs of
the un-Greek world,` notably of the northern barbarians.6 It was
inevitable that the Greeks should think of such revolting practices
as human sacrifice and cannibalism which they found still existing
among uncivilized peoples7 as survivals from a primitive condition
which they in their forward progress had left behind them, and that
they should look on Hellenism, especially in the years before the
'Myers, p. 2.
2 Lavisse, Hist. de France, VIII, 2 Partie, p. 308: "Avant lui [Rousseau], les mis-
sionaires jesuits du Paraguay avaient 6crit des Lettres ou ils opposaient les vertus de
leurs cat6chumAnes aux vices des civilis6s, et repandu en Europe des pr6jug6s sur la
superiorite de i'homme sauvage."
3 See arguments drawn by geographers like Apollodorus from the term Ateyov,
in Strabo vii. 3. 7; and Gilbert Murray's "Greece and the Progress of Man" in The
Rise of the GreekEpic.
4 Berard, Les Phniciens et I'Odyss3e,II, 175, 245; Maine, Ancient Law, p. 120.
' See especially iii. 38; and Bury, Ancient GreekHistorians, p. 44.
6 Book iv.
7 Herod. iv. 103, 106; Pseudo-Platonic Minos 315 B.

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 ETHNOLOGYAND THFEGOLDEN AGE 353

first flush of their triumph in the Persian Wars had faded, as embody
ing all that was best in human achievement.' The issue of that con-
flict was, indeed, the final vindication of a mode of life which had
been till then by no means unprecarious. In Athens, above all, the
past misgivings and hesitations to which the pages of Herodotus
bear ample witness now gave way to that exaltation of spirit and
confident pressing forward to the future which ushered in her Goldern
Age;2 and so, perhaps, it is no accident that Aeschylus, who fought
at Marathon and wrote the Persae, was, so far as we know, the first
Greek to bring into clear relief the idea of human progress from a
helpless, brutish existence to the arts. of life,3 or that Sophocles, who
as a boy had led the victory chant after Salamis, was inspired to
hymn the marvelous conquests of man over the blind forces of a
reluctant world.4
Henceforth the deliverance of man from savagery to civilization
by the grace of Prometheus, or Palamedes, or by his own upward
striving becomes a recurring theme of the Athenian drama.5 The
latest example of it in the tragic poets is a fragment of Moschion6
where we are well on the way to the organic development theory7 of
the fifth book of Lucretius:
Time was when mortalslived the life of beasts
And dwelt in mountaingrots and sunless caves;
For shelteringhousesthey had none as yet
Nor spaciouscity strongwith masonedtowers.
I So in Euripides, Orestes, i'6pos(495),
K0ov6S 'EXX\YWi' saves the world from the
brutish violence of barbarism,
Tr G7jpvwNesroTrO Kacl /ua56;o'
7rac6wv, Kal Y~VKail r6NeLs6Xvo' 'act (523, 524)
Cf. Diimmler, Prolegomena zu Platon's Staat, pp. 47-49.
2 For the psychological effects of the defeat of Persia, see Arist. Pol. 1341a. 30;
Diodorus 12. 1. 3, 4.
3 Prom. Bound, 462 ff. Xenophanes anticipates Aeschylus in a brief couplet:
oDroU7a PXr ?
&pXr&YTa Oeol 0;77-rOLo U7rEo4cLZaP
dXX& Xp6,v 7P-00v1-eS /EupfVpiKOuV0T a1.&eZVOY
Frag. 18 in Diels Frag. der VorSokratiker. The idea of improvement in human con-
ditions was, of course, implicit in culture-hero myths; it may possibly have been a part
of epic tradition, but the dating of the Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus is pure guesswork.
4 Antigone 332-64.
6 Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag., pp. 59, 236, 542, 771, 931; Eur. Suppl. 201 if.;
Meineke, Poet. Corn. Graec., pp. 706, 707.
e Nauck, p. 813.
7 Benn, Greek Philosophers, II, 99.

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 354 GEORGE NORLIN

No curvingplows then brokethe swarthyglebe,

The nurseof corn,nor pruningiron bestowed
Its care on teemingrows of vines; but Earth
Was waste and barren,yielding up no fruit.'
Men fed on humanflesh by slaughteringmen;
And Law lay prostrate; Violencesat the throne
With Zeus; the strongdevouredthe helplesswe-ak.
But soon as Time, which bringsall things to birth
knd fostersall, had wroughtagain a change
In humanlife, whetherby lendingthem
Prometheus'wit or sheer Necessity
Or Nature'sself, throughlong experience,
To be their guide, divine Demeter'sgift
Was found, a gentle sustenance; and found
Was also Bacchus'pleasantspring; the land,
Unsownbefore,was plowedby spans of oxen;
Cities now they girt with walls and housesbuilt,
And changedtheir savage life to gentle ways.
Thenceforththe law enjoinedto hide the dead
In tombs and give to the unsepulchered
Their due of dust, and not to leave exposed
Remindersof their formerghastly feast.2

Moschion's sketch dates probably from the fourth century, but,

although the notion of progress upward from savagery recurs in this
period and later,3 it is especially characteristic of the pride of achieve-
ment and buoyant optimism which followed the Persian Wars.4
I Reading KO1i TrpO(v opoutca.
2 It is significant that every detail of this picture of primitive savagery may be
supplied from the wild tribes described by Herodotus in his fourth book: the Troglo-
dytes dwell in caves and are in other ways little removed from animality (183); the
Scythians have no walled cities or fixed abodes (46); nor do they plow (19); the
Androphagoi are the most savage of human creatures; they are without restraint of
any principle of right or law, and feed on men (106).
It is, of course, not necessary to assume that Moschion took his colors directly
from Herodotus; the essential point is that such details of ethnology were available
in the fifth century and probably earlier. Gomperz, GriechischeDenker, I, 312 (also
Di)mmler, op. cit., p. 28), derives Moschion's sketch directly from Protagoras' lIepZ
TS pyj C
IpX KaaTcLaTTdcewt, but Protagoras may have been indebted to Herodotus,
perhaps "talked with him about ethnology at Thurii'" as Gomperz fancies (I, 353);
cf. also, Nestle, Herodot's VerhMltniszur Phitosophie und Sophistik, pp. 17, 18.
'See Isocrates Panegyricus 28; Aristotle Pot. 1269 A 5; Diodorus i. 8; Delphic
Inscription in Bulletin de Corr. Hellenique, 1900, p. 96; and Rohde, Der griechische
Roman, p. 217.
' Gomperz, I, 311, 312.

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 ETHNOLOGYAND THE GOLDEN AGE 355

Towardthe end of the fifth century there is a markedcooling down

of enthusiasmfor things as they are' and, from this time on, in
increasing disenchantment, a growing conviction, indeed, that civili-
zation has lost the way; that it representsan aberration,a raptx-
jao-ts, from the right path; and that, after all that may be said for
the presentmode of lie, its outstandingfacts are greed,luxury, and
man's inhumanityto nan.
This reactionof feeling is strikingly instancedin the disposition
of the, philosophers,beginning with Socrates, to hold aloof from
political ife and to live more and more in the realm of the ideal,
and, above all, in the cry, "Back to-Nature," which became the
dominating idea of the Cynics and, after them, of the Stoic school
for centuries. Nature is now no longer "red in tooth and claw
with ravin,' but is the wise teacher and sure guide which erratic
society has ignored or contemned; and the natural man is no longer
the savage "nasty and brutish," but a simple and kindly being,
having but little and that little in common with others, and with that
little content; and he is to be found only in a far-awayv past, a Hesh
odic Golden Age, or in a far-away present which civiliz ation has not
touched and spoiled.
Such reversions to Hesiodic pessimism were evidently in the air
before the fifth century closed.> Perhaps the}ystart wth the Sophist
Hippias whom Gomperz regards as the precursor of the Cynics and
Stoics.4 At any rate, they are reflected in Plato,6 who, in certain
moods, associates the virtues of temperance and justice with primi-
tive conditions of a bygone age. In the Laws" he pictures the early
state of society as one of pastoral simplicity where all have enough
to satisfy their necessary wants, but none is rich or poor, and so there
is no occasion for envy or insolence or mjustice to arise. In another
passage of the same dialogue he refers to the view that, of old, men
'lThe ater-gloe the tlumph o-er -fify
Persia Hngers years, accordingto
Diodorus xii. 1. 3, 4.
2 Plato Rep. 496 D, E.
3 Pherecretes' Ayptot seems to have been a burlesque on already current idealiza-
tions of uncivilized life. Plato Protag. 327 D; see Nestle, op. cit., p. 27.
' GriethischeDenker, I, 348.
' Barker, The Political Thought of Plto and Aristotle, pp. 151, 190.
' 679 A-E; cf. Laws 713. a 782 A-D.

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356 GEORGE NORLIN

lived on the fruits of the earth, abstaining from flesh in Orphic

fashion; and in the Republic, in which Socrates sketches the origin
of a city in a state of health, he prescribesa diet exclusively vege-
tarian-bread and cakesand fruit spreadout on the grass;.the people
reclining on boughs of myrtle and yew, wholesomely enjoying the
frugal fare and each other's pleasant company, sound of limb and
long of life and transmittingto their childrenan idyllic existencelike
their own. To this Glaucon objects that Socrates would not do
differently if he were prescribingfor a community of swine, and
insists that people should live in a civilizedmannerwith couchesand
tables and the dishes and desserts of a modernbill of fare. "Very
good," says Socrates, "we are considering,it seems, not the growth
of a healthy city merely, but of a city luxurious and inflamed. I
dare say it is not a bad idea for thus we shall discover the rise of
justice and injustice."'
This notion that the fever of modernlife sets in with the departure
from the simple diet of the fruits of the earth is the basis of the
CulturgeSchichte of the geographer Dicaearchus, if we may trust
Porphyry's brief summary of his History of Greek Civilization. Men
lived in the beginning like Hesiod's Golden Race; they possessed
none of the arts, not even that of tilling the soil; they subsisted on
nature's food, fruits and herbs, without want and without surfeit,
and thereforein a state of health, leisure, peace, and amity. There
was no strugglefor existence,no groundfor strife, no cause for war.
Then came the pastoralstage when peoplebegan to own property,to
eat flesh, and to live luxuriously. Then aroseenvy, dissension,wars,
which increasedin the more elaboratelife of the agriculturalstage.2
Dicaearchus was known to Rousseau and perhaps influenced
him,' but the exact analogueto the "Back to Nature" cult in the
eighteenth century is to be found in the teaching, and apparently
in-the practice, of the Cynics, notably Antisthenes and Diogenes.
IRep. 372 B-E; and Adam's Commentary; cf. Myers, Herodotus and Anthro-
poloy, p. 163. But Plato does not commit himself to this point of view; his sympathy
with it in this passage is playful, not to say ironical (.xnmmler, op. cit., pp. 61, 62);
here, as elsewhere, the dramatist-philosopher eludes classification. See Paul Shorey
" Plato, Lucretius, and Epicurus," Harvard Studie4 in Class. Philology, XII,- 208.
2 MtlUer, Frag. Hist. Graec., II, 233.
1P6hlmann, Geschichtedes antiken Kommuniumus und Sozialismus. I. 113.

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 ETHNOLOGY AND THE GOLDEN AGE 357

Like Rousseau they condemned Prometheus as the great enemy of

mankind.' The gods had withheld fire because they desired that
men should continue in the ideal state of the Golden Age. The arts
and institutions of civilization have enslaved us to effeminacy,
luxury, and injustice. Hardiness, self-sufficiency, and spontaneous
kindness are to be found only in the natural state or among the lower
animals.2 For the Cynics drew lessons, not only from uncivilized
people, but from the animal world; like Walt Whitman, they-
Couldturn and live with animals,they are so placid and self-contained.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied,not one is dementedwith the mani of owningthings.
Not one kneels to anothernor to his kind that lived thousandsof years ago.
Not one is respectableor unhappyover the whole earth.3
From the Cynics the doctrine is taken over by the Stoics. Zeno,
the founder of the school, defined the ideal society as a state of nature
where the characteristic features of the modern city are conspicu-
ously absent: it has no temples, no gymnasiums, no law courts,
no money, no slaves, no private property even in women and chil-
dren ;4 and it becomes a commonplace of Stoic thought that the
course of civilization has been steadily away from the natural kind-
ness and contentment of the Golden Age. Aratus, for example,
draws a pretty picture of the good old days when men had not yet
sailed the sea in search of gain, but were satisfied to till the soil and
to subsist on the produce of their fields. The spirit of Justice then
lived on earth, ever present with men and ever heeded by them, and
there was no strife, no lawsuits, no slaughter. In the less righteous
Silver Age Justice retired to the mountains, whence she came down
at evening to chide the people for their sins and to warn them of
evils to come. When the cruel race of bronze was born, which was
the first to forge the sword and slay oxen for food,5 she withdrew
1Gompers, op. cit., II, 117; Dio Chrys. Or. vi. 25, 30.
2 Dio Chrys.Or. vi. 21-34.
' Ibid., xl. 32.
' Diog. Laert. vii. 33.
ASee Plutarch's use of these lines in his sketch of the progress of cruelty from the
killing of animals to the wholesale slaughter of men in war, IHeptZapxoqaSytis,998 A-B.

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358 GEORGENORLIN

altogether from this odious generation and went to dwell in the

heavens.' Posidonius, also, the last representative of Greek Stoicism
and a great popularizer of the doctrine to the Roman world, asso-
ciated justice with the golden simplicity of the life of primitive man,
and regarded the slaughter of animals for food as the fatal step toward
organized cruelty and war.2
Now these thinkers were not merely playing with traditional
fancies to express their revolt against the shams and shows of arti-
ficial society; neither could they have been blind to the fact that
civilization represents, at least in some respects, an advance over
primitive conditions; 7roXLs6vOpcowrov 3L8actoKELwas a truth as obvious
to them as to Simonides. They were not, however, obsessed by our
modern habit of measuring progress in terms of "Twentieth Century
Limiteds" and high explosives;3 on the contrary, the ancient sages
from Socrates to Marcus Aurelius emphasize the insignificance of the
external trappings and circumstances of life and the all-importance
of that right state of the soul in relation to other souls which they
called &Kataovvrq; and the reactionary view which prevails from the
fourth century on evidently rests on a sincere conviction that what-
ever gains civilization may have made have been won at the expense of
that social sympathy and kindness which are fundamental for huiman
well-beina. Even Lucretius, who is our best source for the theory
of progress, cannot shake himself free from a cynical view of con-
temporary civilization ;4 his doctrine of the simple life accordiing to
nature differs very little from that of the Cynics and the Stoics;5
his picture of the life of primitive man borrows attractive colors from
the Hesiodic description of the Golden Race' and anticipates in many
points the ideal savage of Rousseau.7 Existence had its tragedies
Phaenomena 101-34.
2 " primaque e caede ferarum
Incaluisse putem maculatum sanguine ferrum" (Ovid Met. xv. 1071.
Ovid's picture of degeneration is probably derived, through Varro, from Posidonius;
see Arnold, Roman Stoicism, p. 194, and Georges Lafaye, Les Metamorphosesd'Ovide
et leurs moddlesgrecs, pp. 198-202.
'This point is sufficiently emphasized by Ferrero, Ancient Rome and Modern
America, p. 46 and passim.
4 For a full discussion of the problem presented by Lucretius' inconsistency, see
Eduard Norden, "Philosophische Ansichten ilber die Entstehung des 'Menschen-
geschlechts, seine kulturelle Entwicklung und das goldene Zeitalter," in Fleckeisen's
Jahrbilcherflar Clas. Phil., Suppl., Band 19, pp. 416 ff.
' See beginning of Book ii. 6 v. 942 ff. ' v. 925 ff.

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 ETHNOLOGY AND THE GOLDEN AGE 359

then, such as occasional death from wild beasts, but it is left for the
refined cruelty of a later age to send in a single day thousands of men,
marching with banners spread, into the jaws of deathl-a sentiment
which is not far removed from the Stoic commonplace that progress
in power has meant progress in cruelty and that our invention5 have
been turned to our destruction.2
The first influence, then, which we have to take into account in
explaining the theory of degeneration is an out-and-out disenchant-
ment with the results of the arts and inventions of civilized man.3
This alone is, perhaps, enough to inspire poetic drearmsof an ideal
past; but the well-considered doctrine of the philosophers that man
in the natural state is endowed with the fundamental social virtues
which the characteristic institutions of civilization have conspired
to vitiate or destroy must, to some extent at least, have been grounded
on experience and observation. When they sought for justice in the
actual relations of living men, they found it, not in the rpuvioca -r6XtsL
as Plato calls it, but in the more simple life of peasants and-shepherds
where 7rXEoveIta had not dried up the milk of human kindness ;4 and
among far-away races whose primitive conditions had remained
undistfirbed by contact with the sophisticated world.
The ethnology of so-called primitive peoples has always presented
striking contrasts to the life of civilization, and these contrasts have
not always favored the latter. Professor Tylor in his chapter on the
"Development of Culture," admits that "ethnographers, who seek
in modern savages types of the remotely ancient human race at large,
are bound by such examples to consider the rude life of primeval
man under favorable conditions to have been, in its measure, a good
and happy life'."' He refers to the experience of Sir Alfred Wallace,
who says:
I have lived with communitiesof savages,in South Americaand in the
East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinionof the village
1v. 988 ff.
Seneca N.Q. 5. 18. 15, "nihil invenies tam manifestae utilitatis quod non in
contrarium transeat culpa"; cf. Tibull. i. 10. 1-6, and Kirby Smith's commentary.
"Eine -abersiattigteCultur, im Ekel vor sich selbst," Rohde, op. cit., p. 216.
"'Beatus ille qui procul negotiis,
ut prisca gens mortalium,
paterna rura bobus exercet suis,
Solutus omni faenore."
6 Primitive Culture, 1, 30.

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 360 GEORGE NORLIN

freely expressed. Each man scrupulouslyrespects the rights of his fellow,

and any infrictionof these rights rarely or never takes place. In such a
communityall are nearlyequal. There are none of those wide distinctions
of educationand ignorance,wealth and poverty, masterand servant,which
are the productsof our civilization; thereis none of that widespreaddivision
of labor,which,whileit increaseswealth, also producesconflictinginfluences;
thereis not that severecompetitionand strugglefor e.-stence, or for wealth,
which the dense populat,ionof civilized countriesinevitably creates. All
incitementsto great crimesare thus wanting,and petty ones are repressed,
partly by the influenceof publicopinion,but chieflyby that naturalsernseof
justiceand of his neighbor'srights,whichseemsto be in somedegreeinherent
ia every race of man. Now, although we have progressedvastly beyond
the savage state in intellectualachievements,we have not advancedequally
in morals. It is not too much to say that the mass of our populations
have not at all advancedbeyondthe savagecodeof moralsand have in many
cases sunk belowit.'
The Greeks also had from an early period traditions of such
innocent tribes, who, living simply, without differentiation of prop-
erty or function, were "the justest of men." There were, for
example, the Aethiopians in the extreme South and the Indians of the
Far East,2 but these were semifabulous races of whom they had no
direct knowledge. Their actual experience with uncivilized tribes
was drawn mainly from the contact of their settlements with the
peoples north and east of the Black Sea.3 As early as Homer we have
a refereilce to the Mysians who fed on the mnilkof mares and were
atKat-ra-ota6PpC<7rwP.4 Aeschylus in a fragment of the Prometheus
Unbound speaks of the well-governed Scythians, whose food is the
milk of mares;5 and in another fragment of the same play' there is
a more extended sketch of the Gabians, a people most righteous and
1 Malay Archipelago, II, 460-61. For similar observations and generalizations,
compare Stefinson, " My Quest in the Arctic," Harper's Magazine, CXXVI, 512; and
Georg Forster's confirmation of the Garden of Eden story from his explorations with
Captain Cook, cited by Myers, p. 44.
2 Rohde, op. cit., p. 218.

3 For the experience of the Greeks with these northern tribes, see the introduction
to the thorough work of Neumann, Die Hellenen im Skythenlande.
IL.xiii. 4-6.
5 Nauck, 198; cf. Choerilus, frag. 13 (Didot):

5& :dCL&, 'yevepZ,ciC&u

/AsjXoPv6Aow&
vo,udw5v ye u6v ~Taayd7OLKOL
dvop&$7VrVOAhtMWV.
?Nauck, 196.

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 ETHNOLOGY AND TH-E GOLDEIN AGE 361

kindly to strangers, who do not stir the soil with plow or hoe, but live
on the natural produce of the earth.'
Even Herodotus, who sees in the northern tribes mainly unre-
generate savages,2 makes exceptions of the Argippaeans, whose food
is the fruit of trees, who wrong no man, and are wronged by none;3
and of the Issedonians, who, save for one savage custom, are said
to be just, and to treat their women as equals.4
The geographer Ephorus, who was apparently the first to describe
the Scythian tribes at any length, contrasted two types of these
northern barbarians, the savage 'APGpcoro4a4yoc and a sequestered
tribe of nomads whom he identifies with Homer's raXaCra4a6oL.
The latter he describes as dwelling in wagons, abstaining from animal
food, harming no living thing, having all things in common, even
wives and children, waging no war against others, and free from
attack because they possessed nothing to tempt aggression.5 The
philosopher Posidonius, whose interests embraced also geography and
ethnology, devoted much attention to the Mysians, their pious
scruples against taking life, their diet of milk and honey and cheese,
their moral simplicity and innocence," and appears to have drawn
from them arguments for his theory of the original state of man in the
Golden Age.7
There were not wanting those who, as Apollodorus, took a con-
sistent view of savagery and dismisscd such accounts as poetic moon-
shine.8 Against these skeptics Strabo takes up the cudgels and
chlllenges them to explain the fact that some of the nomad Scythians
of his own day still preserved very much the same manner of life
as that ascribed to them by earlier authorities, notwithstanding that
by this time Greek civilization had spread its degenerative influence

1 It is tempting to take Eumenides, 706, oTr' i' oirre U&ovos

KOact?wV 4O 7T67rOLs
to mean that Scythia and Sparta are the traditional homes of justice, as do Riese
(Die Idealisirung der Naturt,61ker des Nordens in der griechischen und rimischen
Literatur, p. 11) and Pohlmann (op. cit., I, 134), but surely tha significance of these
places is here purely geographical; cf. Soph. Oed. Col., 694.
2jiv. 127. 3iv. 23. 'iv. 26.
6 Miiller, Fr. Hist. Graec., I, 257, p. 257; frags. 76, 78.
a Strabo vii.3 3.
7 Schmekel, Die Phil. d. Mittl. Stoa., pp. 287-88.
8 flXdqavra, Strabo vii. 3. 7, 10.

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362 GEORGE NoRLiN

to almost all peoplesof the worldand infected them, especiallywhere

they had come into contact with the sea, with the poison of greedand
inhumanity.-
It is easy to read both in and between the lines of Strabo's
extended discussion of this question that his interest in it is not
merely that of a dispassionateethnographer,but almost that of a
zealot who is defendingan importantarticle of faith.2 His eamest.
ness and heat betray as evidently as if he had said it in so many words
that he is here the spokesman of a sect who.cherishedthe nomad
Scythiansas a puretype of man in the naturalstate and derivedfrom
them the principal argument for their belief in the degenerative
influenceof civilization.'
If, furthermore,we take the outstandingfeatures in the descrip-
tion of these northerntribes-a pastoralor prepastorallife; a frugal,
mainly a vegetarian,diet; communityof propertyor no propertyat
all; communityof wives and children; a peaceful,orderly,and kindly
existence-and compare them with the characteristicsascribed by
the philosophersto the originalstate of man in the Golden Age, the
correspondenceis too exact to be accidental.
But to what extent the-facts suggestedtheory or theory supplied
the facts is, perhaps, open to discussion. The historicity of the
milk-eating, peace-loving nomads is commonly doubted; Rohde,
for example, apparently treats them as a product of the idealizing
imaginationand thinks them as unrealas the Hyperboreans;'and our
'vii. 3. 7.
2vii. 3. 7, 11: arrtxovord-rovs-r'-yap a64o6s ruT> rotOL c&clfx&o-ra xaerrpci-s&
eTeNea-TrpOVS 76 reXi)7#/V Kal ukrpKfeo-rpovs.
3 d 5ocel fit ets jAep6rra o'7eretre&o&taoetpe& O rT 186i KxalrowX&)ardvrZ 'ri)S
&wXTroS. . eta dye& (vii. 3. 7, 22) reveals the Stoic.

4 Der griech. Roman., p. 217. Rhode follows Riese, who contends that the tradi-
tion of the nomad Scythians begins with Homer, whose fancy sketched the first
outline of a milk-eating, just-dealing, northern race, and that henceforth the Greek
imagination filled in the sketch with various ideals, mainly Pythagorean and Platonic
(op. cit., pp. 20, 21). Riese dismisses the researches' of Ephorus as bookish and
second-hand. Neumann, however, regards Ephorus as a trustworthy authonity, who
may idealize the customs of the Scythians, but always does so on a basis of fact (op. cit.,
I, 315 if.).
The crux of the problem is the community of wives and children. This according
to Riese is read into the institutions of the Scythians from Plato. But, in the first
place, the limited communism of Plato is not the communism attributed to the
Scythians; and, in the next place, Plato cannot be held responsible for the serual

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 ETHNOLOGYAND TH:EGOLDENAGE 363

own view is likely to be determined by a more or less a priori assump-

tion of how the Stone Man and his later representatives should have
behaved in order not to disturb a consistent plan of evolution. But
we can at any rate be sure of these points: that the nomad Scythians
of Ephorus were regarded by the Greeks generally as historical;'
that the preponderance of ancient authority is in favor of this view;
and that there is ethnologically no improbability in attributing to
uncivilized tribes of that time the unspoiled simplicity and the sub-
stantial virtues which Stefanson found in the Eskimos, who had never
seen a white man, and which led him to infer that "the hand of
evolution had written the Golden Rule in the hearts ofithe contempor-
aries of the mammoth millenniums before the Pyramids were built."2
We are, then, in accord with the testimony of antiquity as well
as with modern experience in concluding that the Greeks in their
contact with uncivilized peoples found two sets of facts-one which
supported the view that primeval man existed in a slough of brutish

promiscuity, more or less idealized, ascribed by Herodotus to the Auseans (iv. 180); to
the Agatbyrsians (iv. 104); and to the Massagetae (i. 216). Furthermore, it is quite
clear from the last reference that the common Greek view, from which Herodotus here
dissents, attributed this custom to the Scythians as did Ephorus and later writers
generally (see, fr. ex., Nicolaus Damascenus, 123; Miller, III, 460). Indeed, such
contrasts to their own marriage customs the Greeks found in many parts of the world;
other examples are reported by Aristotle, Pol. 1262 A 19; Xanthus, frag. 28; Theo-
pompus, frag. 222; Nicolaus, frags. 111, 135, in Mfilller, Frag. Hist. Graec.; and
Diodorus ii. 58-enough to give plausibility to the dramatic exaggeration in Eur.
Andromache, 173 fif.
roOOV7oY 7rnv # dpj?apOv .yivos
TaT75p -re Ou'yarpZ 7raze-rs /A JTpl Atyvv-ra&
Kcbp-jT' d8eXo,4.
. . . . Kal -rcZv8' ov'& i(efp-ye& V6;o,.
For paraUels from modern ethnology, see Andrew Lang's article "Family," in Ency-
clopaedia Britannica.
No one denies, so far as I know, that the customs of the so-called nature peoples
have been "idealized" in interpretation, as when Strabo says that the Scythians had
wives and children in common (vii. 3.7)
7rXaCroKKCWs or when Lewis Morgan finds the
exact conditions of his "Maylayan" or "Consanguine " family in Plato's Timaeus
18 C, D. (Ancient Society, p. 417); but it seems more probable that ethnological
facts, however imperfectly understood, should have given suggestion to theory (see
Gomperz, II, 413; Barker, op. cit., p. 152; Dummler, op. cit., p. 56; and Adam's edition
of Plato's Republic, I, 355) than that Plato's ideal of communism should have beea
foisted on the nomad Scythians and other primitive peoples.
1 Strabo vii. 3. 7, 10. a(Z5T77i1r 6X-IVs Kal vv',9TL
v,rdvAA lrap& -rts-E1XX77o
2 "My Quest in the Arctic," Harper's Magazine, CXXVI, 512.

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364 GEORGENORLIN

savagery, the other that he lived in an Eden of innocent simplicity;

that at the time of, exultant pride in their own life and contempt for
what lay outside of it they seized on savage and revolting practices
among the wild barbarians as typical of the dark age from which
they were confidently pressing forward to a golden future; and that
later in a period of discontent and disillusionment their philosophers
emphasized the uncorrup-tedvirtues of primitive races to prove that
time must "run back and fetch the Agfeof Gold."'
IJNIYERSITY OP CoLoRADO

I The poetic fancy of Milton and Vergil and Shelley that the Golden Age will be
restored is also a Stoic hope. See Kirby Smith's article "Ages of the World" in
Haastings'Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, I, 198.

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